by Kate Elliott
“Henry?” She seemed about to smile, but did not. “I am named Chabi, although you may call me Judith, after my father’s mother, if you wish. My mother was Sorgatani, princess of the Kerayit.”
“How could I have guessed, when it is all Fulk has been speaking of this past month?”
“Henry!”
She laughed.
The youth nodded in his quiet way. “Well met.”
“You’re new to the progress, aren’t you?”
“He’s been with me for almost three years now,” said Fulk. “He came to Lavas just after you left that last time.”
But she did not look at him. “Where are you come from?”
“Rikin Fjord,” said Henry.
“He’s a great grandson of Stronghand,” said Fulk.
“Are you so?” she said with renewed interest.
Henry was leaner and shorter than most of the Eika, with a pure golden color of skin, although he wore Wendish clothing that mostly covered his body and limbs. His claws were politely sheathed, and he had such an easy seat on a horse that Fulk had a difficult time believing that in the old days all horses had shied from the Eika smell.
“Yes,” Henry added. “Some say I resemble him, but of course I never met him. Originally I was to become a cleric in the queen’s schola.”
“A cleric?” She seemed about to sputter, as if she found the notion of an Eika male praying and kneeling quite funny, but then caught herself. “But not anymore?”
Henry shrugged. It was a gesture that looked both strange and familiar in him, but he had been raised as much among humankind as among his Eika brothers.
“My sister’s husband died of the lung fever this past spring,” said Fulk quickly, eager to draw attention. “So now it seems the queen has remembered the old contract between Queen Theophanu and Lord Stronghand, and she’s talking of marrying Henry to Constance to fulfill the agreement that an Eika prince be married into the royal family once in every generation, to renew the alliance.”
“It will happen only if the succession is secure,” said Henry calmly.
“Well!” she said. And then, “Well!” She looked keenly at Fulk. “Is the succession secure?”
He grimaced. He couldn’t help himself. “I’m still the horse kept in reserve. Constance is pregnant—was already, of course, when Thietmar died—but we’ve heard nothing yet. Pray God nothing happens to her! She’s near her time.”
“Surely the queen has some alliance in mind for you, Fulk.”
Henry chuckled. Fulk slapped at him, but then the captain called up, “You’ll never throw a good blow, my lord, if it all comes from the arm.”
Henry looked away to hide his amusement—he had a particular way of squaring his shoulders when he was trying not to laugh! Chabi snorted. Fulk found refuge in babbling.
“Now there’s talk of marrying me off to some Alban princess in the western counties, the ones that are pushing into Eika territory. But that’s better than the plan they were talking of all summer, sending me to Ashioi country to marry the new Feather Cloak!”
Chabi considered this. Most likely she had ridden recently through those lands, and had a better idea of the troublesome situations there than he did. “Had you a choice, what would it be?”
You! You! You!
He smiled tightly. “I am an obedient son. I do as I’m told.”
“I’m sorry to hear that!”
Henry laughed.
She added, “You might become a phoenix, as I am.”
Spoken out loud, the words seemed harsh.
“A prince cannot fly,” he said bitterly. “Though I would if I could.”
“Any person with a willing heart and a stubborn mind can learn to weave sorcery and walk the crowns.”
“These are easy words from your mouth! You are a third child and thereby freer than the rest of us. Anyway, your mother was a powerful shaman, and your father—”
“Her pura, nothing better than a slave, and about whom the less is said the better,” she said in a tone that cut him.
“We’re there,” said Henry, lifting a hand to warn him. “And I fear me that your mother the queen is waiting for you, Fulk.”
They rode free of the forest to see the walls and sentry fires of Thersa, where Queen Blessing and her progress had rested these past four days. The palisade and palace were old, but the estate had grown and spread in recent years with the shift of population out of the south after the great earthquake. Now, of course, the guesthouse was full and the inner pasture covered with tents and wagons.
The lamps held over the gatehouse revealed a party loitering under the still-open gate: the queen and her Dragon guardsmen. She had not the generous affection that had made her father so beloved, but she was respected. And she was fiercely possessive of all that was hers.
As he was hers. Her only surviving son.
First she had married Benedict, son of Conrad and Tallia, and by him produced her heir, Constance, and two boys. More recently, she had married for a third time, allying herself to the royal family of Karrone because of the incursions out of Aosta.
Born fourth, Fulk had outlasted his two older brothers, and seen a younger half Karronish sister born when he was eight.
But it was because he was the only child of her shortlived second marriage to the man she had loved best—besides her father—that the queen loved him so well. Too well, some said in whispers when they thought he wasn’t listening. He should never have been fostered out to his grandfather and grandmother in Lavas, but he had been raised there, and well loved there, and there he had fallen helplessly in love with a young woman not five years older than him who yet seemed so far out of his reach that he might as well have hoped to fly. And it wasn’t just calf love, a youth’s callow infatuation!
As they rode up, Chabi bent close and murmured one last comment near his ear.
“Your grandmother would never have asked permission. She just would have done it.”
He burned. But he said nothing.
“Fulk,” said the queen as he dismounted to greet her. She kissed him on either cheek, and turned to the phoenix. “You are come, but I suppose you will wish for drink and food, and perhaps a bath to wash away the dust of your travels.”
“So I would, Your Majesty, and be grateful for it, for I’ve nothing urgent to bring to your attention. I only wondered—” She hesitated, and he saw for the first time that she had a full heart and could not speak.
At last she swallowed and forced out a few words. “I meant to go to Lavas, but now … I am not so certain. I’ve been gone a long time.”
The queen nodded. She was scarred, but resilient. “You’ll be welcome there, and needed, I am thinking. My younger sister is a strong count, a good steward for her lands, but I fear she does not have the temperament to advise such an unruly schola. They need a firmer hand to keep them in line. You were always my mother’s best student.”
She blanched. “I am accustomed to—a different life, Your Majesty. I am not accustomed to biding in one place.”
The queen nodded. “Yet it is my command, phoenix. I want you to go to Lavas and become praeceptor at the schola there. It is what I need from you, right now. Captain, if you will.”
The captain gathered horses and soldiers and directed them toward the barracks. Henry made his courtesies and headed for the chapel from which Fulk heard a pair of handsome voices singing the nightly chain of psalms celebrating Mother and Son.
The queen took Fulk’s arm and drew him away. Chabi followed as they crossed the court and entered into the innermost chambers, reserved for the regnant, which looked out over a garden made invisible by night. The scent of flowers wafting in on the night breeze teased them. He yawned, feeling both drowsy and strangely on edge.
As if the tide had already turned, and he was caught in the rip current, being dragged out to sea.
“Sit down,” the queen said to him, but she remained standing, as did Chabi, and it was to the phoenix that she addre
ssed her words.
“Let me say this quickly, or I will not say it at all. The boy is restless. He is much like his father, a quick mind and eager heart. His father studied for a year at Lavas, that very first year, and learned much and would have learned more but he was sent away at the order of Queen Theophanu—of blessed memory—to marry an Alban princess. It was necessary to preserve alliances and to throw up obstacles in the path of a string of rebellions. I see that now, naturally. He did as he was told. He was still grieving for Conrad’s daughter. I see that now.”
She turned away, hiding her expression in shadow. The lamps hissed. At the door, a Dragon guard, one of the Quman youths come in this year’s levy from the east, stepped in with a full pitcher of water and a flagon of wine. At last, she cleared her throat and turned back to them.
“Even so, when after many years his Alban wife died and he could come home, he asked again to join the schola at Lavas. But it happened that I had been made a widow recently, when Benedict died of the flux, poor man, and the margrave of Villain would see her family raised as high as she could, and naturally my father listened to her second only to my mother, and of course I was all too eager for the match to think of what it might mean to him—”
Again, her voice caught. She touched Fulk on the arm affectionately, but did not smile.
“And then, after all, he died within three years of our betrothal and marriage. I would not have his son be forced onto the path he was commanded to walk. I made no promises at that time, for you know, Berthold died so suddenly.”
It was a raw wound still, although Berthold Villam had died almost sixteen years ago.
“Liath always spoke fondly of Lord Berthold,” said Chabi.
The queen smiled sadly. “I thank you for saying so.”
In Lavas hall the nightly feasting was warm and boisterous. It had always been a lively place, and Fulk noted the contrast with the hushed corridors of Thersa. There had been a feast the first night they had come here, of course, so the locals might greet them and be presented in their turn, but after all the queen preferred a quiet sojourn, her attention fixed on a series of charters and capitularies and disputes brought to her attention from the string of royal estates and monasteries in this part of Wendar.
She sighed. Because he had spent his childhood and youth in Lavas, he did not know his mother well. It was usual to foster a child out in order to cement alliances, but he could not help but wonder how she could claim to love him so well and then send him away so early and for so long—and not even to. a distant ally, to foster an alliance, but to the home of her own beloved parents.
“I have had news today, from one of my Eagles. Constance has given birth to a healthy daughter, in Gent. If the infant lives, then she has borne two living children out of her own body, and Fulk takes a second step back from the succession.”
“May God bless child and mother both,” said Chabi, and Fulk echoed her, although he scarcely knew his older sister and had not spent more than a month altogether in her company in his entire life.
The queen took up a poker as if wielding a sword and stirred the coals on the hearth until they flickered into flame. Two braziers heaped with coals also battled the growing autumn chill.
“I am weary, phoenix,” she continued. “I have two husbands dead and the third not at all to my taste despite the importance of the treaty and the child we conceived between us. I do not wish this on my son. I will not put on him the burden that was given onto me. I want him to have what his father could not. If he so chooses.”
Suddenly the room was too hot. Fulk was flushed, heart galloping. But the queen’s grave expression gave him pause.
He had never seen her weep; one tear, that was all, the day he had arrived at the queen’s progress two years ago. The high rafters swallowed all sound and ate at the light. The gloom in the corners was profound. He felt a surge of tenderness for her.
She sent me to the place she loved best.
“I w-would stay with you,” he stammered.
She snorted, and a mask twisted her expression so he heard the serpent’s tongue and saw the sword’s thrust that folk feared. “You would not!”
It had never been turned on him before.
She melted at once. “Ah, poor boy, I don’t mean it like that. I mean only that when a lad mopes about the stable yard and rides to every crown he can find, then he is not pining for his mother. However much he loves her. Anyway, it serves my purpose, as my uncle Lord Stronghand was used to say, and these days I suppose I have as little heart as he ever did.”
Chabi had remained silent and still all this time, showing neither surprise nor fear. “How does it serve your purpose, Your Majesty?”
“To count a son among my mother’s fabled nest of phoenix? To let one among the royal family hold in his hands those secrets, now that my mother is gone? Of course it serves me! The world is a restless place. Night comes quickly.”
“Yet the heavens are brilliant in their beauty.”
“Maybe for you, phoenix, but I have a habit of stumbling when it is dark. So, Fulk, what do you say?”
He groped for words, but was too stunned to speak, and after a moment she smiled gently, took his hand, and kissed him as if in farewell.
The day her son rode out from the queen’s progress, the queen went into the Octagonal Garden to watch him go in something resembling privacy. Decades ago, Queen Sophia had commissioned a garden to be built at Werlida in the Arethousan style. It had eight walls, eight benches, eight neatly tended garden plots that bloomed with brilliant colors in spring and summer but were now brown with autumn’s rags. Eight radial pathways spoked in to the center where stood the monumental fountain formed in the shape of a domed tower and surrounded by eight tiers of angels cavorting and blowing trumpets. According to legend, the fountain had ceased flowing on the very day Queen Sophia died, but in fact the mechanism had failed years before because the Arethousan craftsman who had devised the cunning inner workings had died of a lung fever one winter and no one else knew how to repair it.
Or so Queen Theophanu had told Blessing, years and years ago, that winter when the king lay dying. That was the mystery. One night a humble visitor had called on the king in the middle of the night, unseen by everyone except the king himself, who spoke of their long conversation in expansive detail although everyone else was sure he had descended into his final delirium. Yet the fountain had begun running again that very night, and it splashed and gurgled still, many years later. She thought it actually spoke with the last words Stronghand had whispered to her, there at the end: Be merciful.
The memory soothed her heart as she stood on the gravel path and watched Fulk’s entourage reach the branching road and his banner turn north.
A magnificent vista opened before her. The land spread out as fields and villages, pastureland and scrub brush and woodland, and farther yet, the distant march of forest. The river vanished into the haze of trees.
From this palace almost fifty years ago her parents had sneaked away in the middle of night, defying King Henry, and at some point on their southerly journey or at Verna, she herself had been conceived. It was a fitting place for her son to ride out on a new path. Fulk was a good boy, but it was really her enduring love for Berthold that had caused her to let him go. Anyway, it was true enough that it served her purpose to have her son educated in the arts of the mathematici. She might gain any number of advantages large and small with this strategy.
Over time, she had discovered she was more Stronghand’s heir than her own beloved father’s. Impulse must not govern action, Stronghand had taught her; it was a struggle, but she had mastered herself over time.
They had lost part of Alba, regained it, yet were now struggling to keep a foothold there. In the wake of tidal inundations and severe alterations in the ocean currents, the Eika territories were splintering into four petty kingdoms. Ships sailing along the coast had mysteriously vanished, only to drift months later into port with all hands lost. P
art of Varingia had been swallowed by Salia, Wayland had for a few years claimed to be an independent queendom with the support of Mathilda of Aosta, while the Villams now styled themselves as dukes, equal to Saony, Fesse, and Avaria. The North Mark had experienced a ten-year drought, followed by floods. In the east, the Polenie had been overrun by a Salavii uprising. All of southern Aosta still lay in ruins, scarred by continual volcanic eruptions, and Karrone had been terribly hard hit in the great earthquake that had driven so many people north as refugees. Meanwhile, her own cousins among the Ashioi pushed their borders northward at a slow but steady pace, causing the Arethousans to send to Wendar increasingly desperate pleas for alliances and treaties of mutual aid.
And so on, and so forth, the unending turn of the wheel. Still, it could have been worse. Conrad’s daughter had changed her mind and cut all ties to Mathilda, who had only a scrap of land near Novomo left to call her queendom. The Ashioi had sent an envoy asking for a marriage alliance. Several trading guilds had established themselves along the Eika shores, and it seemed the Eika liked to trade as much as they liked to fight. Fearsome merfolk swam into ports asking after the health of brothers and sisters and sons and daughters and beloved partners they could certainly never have met or been in any way related to, especially considering that they seemed to have the memories of men who had been lost at sea, and yet in some places strange but lasting bonds were formed between fishermen and merchants and these savage water folk, each helping the others. A Quman muster pushing for an invasion into the marchlands had abruptly dissolved when a pair of griffins had carried away the most belligerent of the war leaders. The civil war in Salia—raging for over three decades—had at last died away, no doubt of exhaustion, and the constant debilitating flow of refugees into Varre had eased in recent years. Just last year, a peculiar party of envoys had arrived at Autun from a stunted, deformed folk calling themselves the Ancient Ones and claiming to be miners and scholars of natural history. Young Henry had come south from Rikin Fjord, and she thought he would be a steadying influence on the volatile Constance.
